Christmas testimony

Believing the church in China needed educated women to be Christian wives and mothers, as well as Bible women and evangelists, Mildred Cable and Eva French opened a girls' school in Huozhou, China in 1904. They began with twenty four students, but before the year was out they had seventy women and girls in attendance. In 1908 Eva's sister Francesca joined the work, and the three women worked together for the rest of their lives, becoming known as ‘The Trio'.

The school continued to grow and graduated its first class of teachers in 1913. Over a period of twenty years, approximately 1,000 girls we’re educated at the school. Many of the girls went on to become teachers themselves, impacting Chinese education throughout the region. In 1923, when the Governor of Shanxi decided to open seventy new provincial schools for girls, he called on the Trio’s students and teachers to staff the schools.

At that time Dr Kao, a Christian Chinese doctor, invited the Trio to come and help in reaching out to Muslims, Tibetan and Mongolian people in the interior. When the women heard of the Silk Road, stretching a thousand miles from Gansu province to Xinjiang province, and the need for evangelism among the people in remote areas, they answered the call. The three travelled by mule cart. Eight hundred miles and nine months from Huozhou, they arrived at their first stop, Zhangye. The pastor at the small church there said they were an answer to prayer. In the coming months The Trio conducted a Bible school for men and women, taught reading classes, and travelled into the surrounding villages to preach the gospel. They set up a tent at the village fairs, and people gathered to listen to the Christian message. The size of the church congregation doubled, and many natives were trained in the work of evangelism.

The Trio then moved on to Jiuquan and Dunhuang, which was a crossroads for people from India, China and Tibet and had a heavy Muslim population. They later followed the Silk Road to the Russian border, crossing portions of the Gobi Desert. After a furlough in England, The Trio returned to China in 1928, in the midst of a civil war. They retraced their steps along the Silk Road, encouraging the Christians in their faith, visiting 2,700 homes, conducting 665 meetings and selling 40,000 copies of Scripture. 

During the war Muslim forces gained control of 600 miles of the Silk Road and the city of Dunhuang. The Muslim general, noted for his cruelty, summoned The Trio to the army headquarters eighty miles away and asked them to bring their medical supplies. They treated the general’s wounds. Once they had healed, Mildred asked permission for them to leave. She also asked him to consider the life he led, and he accepted from her a New Testament. 

In 1936, the communists required The Trio, along with other foreigners, to leave China, Mildred and Francesca later wrote of their travels in The Gobi Desert, which continues to be an excellent guide into that remote region today.